Introduction

Abstract

Like the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer on May 20, 2020, the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, were not only shocking in their own right, but they also helped catalyze a broader nationwide debate over violence and structural racism. In the latter incident, a twenty-one-year-old man went to three spas and massage parlors in the Atlanta area, where he shot and killed eight individuals, six of whom were Asian women working at the spas: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue (two white customers at one of the spas, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels, were also killed). In the discussions that followed the tragedy, many commentators drew links between these killings and a larger pattern of anti-Asian violence in the United States that had accelerated during the pandemic and often targeted women and the elderly.1In an uncanny coincidence, on the morning of March 17, less then twenty-four hours after the Atlanta shootings and on the other side of the country, there was another widely publicized incident involving a white man and an Asian woman. While peddling her wares on a street corner in San Francisco, seventy-five-year-old Xiao Zhen Xie was punched by a stranger—though in this case, unlike the outcomes of so many other recent similar incidents, Xie fortunately was not seriously injured,2 and furthermore was apparently able to fight back against her attacker. After the attack, video and images circulated virally of Xie brandishing a wooden board at her assailant, who by this point was lying bloodied on a stretcher surrounded by police. For a nation still processing the trauma of the Atlanta attacks, and which for months had been watching in dismay as a string of unprovoked attacks left countless elderly Asian Americans injured or dead, the image of a petite septuagenarian Chinese woman fighting off her attacker while cursing in Cantonese was almost too good to be true. Xie's family quickly set up a GoFundMe campaign that brought in more than a million dollars, as she was embraced as a symbol of resistance to racialized violence. (It was subsequently announced that Xie would donate virtually all the campaign's proceeds to a nonprofit that her family created after the attack, to help fight anti-Asian hate crimes.)Following the Atlanta attacks, there was considerable discussion of the shooter's claims that he had attacked his victims on account of the tension between his self-described “sex addiction” and his puritanical Christian faith (he reportedly claimed that he attacked the women at the spas in order to “remove temptation”), but much less attention was given to comparable details that emerged in the aftermath of the San Francisco attack. In particular, the assailant in the latter incident was revealed to be a homeless man with a history of severe mental illness, who had just been beaten by several other men in a homeless encampment at UN Plaza, a few blocks away. Several minutes of surveillance video released by the homeless man's public defender shows the man being struck dozens of times by the other men, one of whom then follows him when he tries to flee and hits him several more times in the head. By the time the homeless man reaches the street corner where Xie is standing, he appears disoriented and is flailing wildly at his attacker, who is standing just feet away.3 After the homeless man strikes Xie (and another elderly Vietnamese man in the same location), he is tackled almost immediately by a security guard and pinned to the ground, at which point Xie hits the man's feet with a wooden board.4 The video would appear to corroborate the public defender's contention that the homeless man was as much a victim as Xie herself, and that the overall situation was significantly more complex than it initially appeared. As the public defender put it: “We want to show the difference between the complexity of truth and the simplicity of initial assumptions.”5Beyond the mirrored relationship between the Atlanta and San Francisco incidents (both involved white men attacking older Asian women, though they had very different outcomes), there was also an inverse relationship between the way each incident was understood in relation to a broader context. Whereas the Atlanta shootings were followed by animated debates over whether the attacks should be viewed in the context of racism, misogyny, or religion, the San Francisco attack was instead often viewed in an almost radically decontextualized fashion, with relatively little discussion of contextual factors such as structural issues of homelessness and mental illness. These divergent responses to the two incidents, in turn, reflect a set of challenges posed by a broader pattern of anti-Asian violence. How should one negotiate the twin desires to validate the specificities of an individual incident while simultaneously assessing the incident's significance as a symptom of a larger phenomenon? How should one understand the relationship between racial animus and other aggravating or confounding factors such as mental illness, homelessness, and religion?The question of how to understand the relationship between an incident and its broader context is also one of the central concerns of Eric Hayot's The Hypothetical Mandarin. Hayot's study takes as its starting point a Western discursive trend that uses the hypothetical possibility of Chinese death to anchor a set of abstract reflections on the nature of sympathy and moral judgment. Hayot traces this conceit back to the 1790 edition of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith wonders how a European would react to the news that an earthquake has taken the lives of millions of Chinese. Noting that the European in this example would undoubtedly experience considerable distress if he were to lose his own “little finger,” Smith asks whether, in order to prevent “this paltry misfortune to himself,” the European “man of humanity [might] be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?”6 Smith concludes that, although “human nature startles with horror at the thought,” our “passive feelings” would nevertheless “almost always” lead us to prioritize what directly affects us (e.g., the loss of a little finger) over “whatever concerns other men” (e.g., the deadly Chinese earthquake). Although Smith insisted that our “active principles” dictate that we should sacrifice one's own interests in favor of the greater interests of others, his speculation that one might indeed remain blithely oblivious in the face of millions of Chinese deaths proved to be oddly compelling to the Western imagination. Within a century the hypothetical had become so common that French dictionaries even began to include the phrase “tuer le mandarin” (to kill the mandarin), understood as meaning “to commit an evil action in the hope that it will remain unknown” (or, as a more recent dictionary puts it, “killing, with certain impunity, a complete stranger in the expectation of some advantage”).7Taking this conceit of the “hypothetical mandarin” as his starting point, Hayot examines a broader pattern of Western representations of China, and specifically Chinese-directed violence, while at the same time reflecting on the methodological implications of what it means to examine a concept of China as refracted through a Western imagination in the first place. In considering the significance of this Western fascination with hypothetical anti-Chinese violence, Hayot proposes a metaphor of the ecliptic to theorize “the universal in relation to a false sense of centrality rather than the universal as such.”8 In astronomical terms, the ecliptic is the sun's apparent path as seen from the Earth's surface. If one assumes that the Earth is stationary, then the sun's path through the sky is one of the defining features of the celestial order. In practice, of course, we know that this solar movement is merely an illusion—an artifact of the Earth's rotation on its axis and its elliptical orbit around the sun.9 Hayot suggests that the ecliptic may be used to characterize “a particular kind of relationship between the local and the universal: the universal as it is imagined from a particular perspective, one whose locality is named and defined by the universal it declares.”10 It is precisely this fundamentally relational quality, Hayot explains, that makes the ecliptic a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship between China and the West in the cross-cultural space explored in The Hypothetical Mandarin, insofar as the ecliptic is “a figure of the relation between two things rather than a sign for one or the other of them; it is the figure . . . of a relation, and not of the things related.”11In explaining the concept of the ecliptic, Hayot uses the tension between geocentric and heliocentric perspectives to illustrate a parallel tension between a “virtually local” and a “virtually universal” perspective, noting that the ecliptic's “‘universal’ figure, namely the sun, was as universal a figure as it was possible to think in the chasm between Ptolemy and Copernicus.”12 Of course, in the half millennium since Copernicus first proposed his heliocentric model, our understanding of the universe itself has advanced considerably, and we now recognize that the heliocentric vision of the Earth revolving around a stationary sun is as much a fiction as was the pre-Copernican geocentric vision of the sun revolving around a stationary Earth. This is because, even as the Earth rotates around the sun at a relative speed of approximately 30 km/second, the sun itself is hurtling through space at a far greater speed—approximately 600 km/s relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB), once the sun's movement through the galaxy, our galaxy's movement relative to other nearby galaxies, and our local galaxy cluster's movement relative to other galaxy clusters are all taken into account.13 From this perspective, accordingly, the Earth's movement actually takes the form not of an ellipse, but rather of an elongated helix—like a Slinky that has been stretched out until it is nearly straight.14 Moreover, in contrast to both a pre-Copernican geocentric perspective and a post-Copernican heliocentric perspective, more recent astronomical analyses seek to calculate the Earth's actual movement in relation not to any single point of reference, but rather to the CMB—which is to say, the nearly ubiquitous background glow of radiation that is an artifact of the Big Bang itself.15Although this “post-ecliptic” model of the Earth's movement through space as an elongated spiral reflects the most up-to-date understanding of the way celestial bodies are oriented in relation to one another, it still necessarily posits a basis against which the Earth's relative movement is understood. In this respect, even this post-ecliptic vision of the Earth's movement as an elongated spiral may, in fact, be viewed as a kind of ecliptic in its own right—albeit one wherein the basis of the “sense of centrality” against which the universal is imagined is not something falsely assumed to be a fixed location (like the Earth, in the original geocentric model, or the sun, in the subsequent heliocentric model), but rather a fundamentally decentered artifact of the Big Bang: the almost unimaginably violent event that generated the universe itself almost fourteen billion years ago. The movement, in other words, is understood in relation not to a localized ground, but rather to a delocalized and dispersed background (like the cosmic microwave background, in the astronomical model). Violence, under this view, is not merely an object of the analysis, it is also the very (back)ground on which the analysis itself relies. Or, as Slavoj Žižek, borrowing a metaphor from Wagner's The Ring, puts it, “The wound is healed only by the sword that smote you.”16To bring these reflections back to the tuer le mandarin conceit, this sort of post-ecliptic model suggests that there is no non-relational way of approaching the Chinese-directed violence captured in the conceit. Rather than attempting to view the conceit from a putatively stable ground of Eurocentric assumptions about Chinese alterity, a post-ecliptic approach would instead view it from a radically decentered background that is itself an artifact of a pervasive violence. Similarly, with respect to the phenomenon of contemporary anti-Asian violence in the United States, this sort of post-ecliptic approach would ground itself not on any single factor (such as racial animus), but rather it would take as its starting point the mutual interaction between countless different overlapping sets of factors—including regimes of structural racism, misogyny, agism, nationalism, xenophobia, poverty, mental illness, and so forth, each of which is itself an artifact of structural violence in its own right.Moreover, one could also take a similar approach to any of the specific sets of structural considerations that, in the aggregate, make up the generalized background discussed above. For instance, with respect to the role of xenophobia, there is little doubt that the Trump administration's protectionist rhetoric and its attempts to blame China for the pandemic helped promote racist attitudes and behavior. More generally, the pandemic has led to a heightened attention to border control worldwide, with many countries stringently restricting entry by nonresidents (and, in some instances, even locking out their own citizens and residents for extended periods of time), and this increased vigilance about border security has inevitably helped fuel nationalist and xenophobic tendencies. The violent disruptions caused by the pandemic, accordingly, have helped generate the conditions under which the recent outbreaks of anti-Asian violence become more likely.At the same time, however, anxieties about immigration—and specifically immigration from Asia—are obviously not new. Most notably, concerns about the so-called yellow peril led to a wave of new border control measures targeting Chinese immigration in several white settler nations beginning around the 1880s, and in the United States these included measures such as the Angell Treaty (1880), the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and the Geary Act (1892). Although these early measures may have been driven by specific concerns about immigration from Asia, historian Adam McKeown argues that these “emergency” measures helped lay the groundwork for the globalized system of border control that we see today: “The techniques designed to control Asians became the template for practical workings of general immigration laws in the white settler nations, and ultimately around the world. By the 1920s, appropriation of these laws by particular nations was driven less by practical needs than by the need to produce the documentation expected by other nations and to live up to international standards of a well-governed nation state.”17 The implication is that our current global border control system is essentially a normalization of what had initially been presented as a set of emergency measures—which is to say, a state of exception that has become a new status quo.18 To the extent that pandemic-related attempts to tighten national border controls have encouraged a resurgence of xenophobic tendencies, it is important to remember that xenophobic tendencies are not the antithesis of the globalized border control system on which transnational travel currently relies. Rather, they are the background out of which the border control system emerged in the first place.A similar point can be made about the role of racialized language, and indeed of language itself. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, cites the existence of certain forms of linguistic exchange used for cooperative purposes—or what he calls “strong communicative action”—as providing a non-transcendental ground on which rational and ethical “lifeworlds” may be established.19 On the other hand, Habermas acknowledges that, even if one may characterize some forms of linguistic interaction as meeting the criteria for what he calls “strong communicative action,” there are nevertheless many forms of linguistic interaction that do not meet this elevated standard. In a racialized colonial context, for instance, Franz Fanon extrapolates from observations about language in the French Caribbean to claim more broadly that “every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.”20 In Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida draws on his own experience growing up as a Jew in mid-century colonial Algeria—where he felt that French was the only language he truly had but which was never truly his own—to reflect on the more general nature of the othering function of language itself. For language to be able to function as a medium of communication, Derrida concludes, it necessarily has to be derived from a social collective and hence can never belong to any individual. In other words, all language is inherently, and ineluctably, a “language of the other.” Or, as he epigrammatically puts it, “I have only one language, yet it is not mine.”21In a discussion that builds on both Fanon's and Derrida's analyses of the force of language in a racialized (post)colonial context, Rey Chow argues that “the phenomenon of racialization raises to a second order the force of a cut (or separation) that is fundamental to the way language operates”: “Either from within (such as a name that turns out to be more than a name, a name that contains in it an address and a call) or from without (such as an act of interpellation that cannot materialize without the respondent's turning around), this cut introduces a bifurcation, which remains empty insofar as it holds out different promises, whether in the form of an imagined community or in the form of police surveillance and seizure.”22 For Rey Chow, accordingly, all language use functions by interpellating the subject into (or excluding the subject from) an external community—and regardless of whether this be the sort of explicitly racialized colonial community described by Fanon or the sort of idealized lifeworld theorized by Habermas, the process of interpellation and suture necessarily involves a “cut” grounded on “force/violence.”At the same time, however, even as the interpellative function of language necessarily involves a “cut” grounded on “force/violence,” language itself is also—as Judith Butler notes in a discussion of hate speech—“the condition of possibility for the speaking subject”: “The subject has its own ‘existence’ implicated in a language that precedes and exceeds the subject, a language whose historicity includes a past and future that exceeds that of the subject who speaks. And yet; this ‘excess’ is what makes possible the speech of the subject.”23 Though Butler takes as her starting point the axiom that “language has within it its own possibilities for violence and for world-shattering,”24 she nevertheless resists the impulse—found in many recent legal decisions and theoretical works—to view certain types of speech (or representation) as inherently hateful in their own right, arguing instead that hate and injury are never solely a function of language itself, but rather of how it is used, which means that all language use necessarily contains the possibility of resignification and transformation. In other words, even as “language constitutes the subject in part through foreclosure,” it is this same process that “constitutes the possibility of agency in speech,” which in turn “suggests that agency is derived from limitations in language, and that limitation is not fully negative in its implications.” Butler concludes that it is precisely through a focus on these limitations of language that we may thereby “think about worlds that might one day become thinkable, sayable, legible, the opening up of the foreclosed and the saying of the unspeakable become part of the very ‘offense’ that must be committed in order to expand the domain of linguistic survival. The resignification of speech requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms.”25Each of the six essays that compose this forum takes the Atlanta attacks as a starting point for reflecting on issues relating to the recent escalation of anti-Asian violence in the United States and the larger context within which it is positioned. The first two essays, by Alexa Alice Joubin and Karen Fang, for instance, trace some of the underlying structural conditions contributing to anti-Asian racism, particularly in the context of the United States, focusing on a dialectics of representation and perception. First Joubin, who is a professor of English and Theater Studies at George Washington University, examines how cinematic representations help reinforce racist attitudes, focusing specifically on how many of these representations reflect a double logic wherein Asian bodies are fetishized even as Asianness itself is strategically erased. While Joubin focuses on how Asians are represented on-screen, Fang adopts an inverse approach and examines how Asian Americans have been rendered effectively invisible within US media culture and political discourse. Fang, who is a professor of English at the University of Houston, opens with an anecdote about how a recent attempt—by a manager of the Houston Rockets—to offer support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters immediately backfired, as other prominent voices on the team and throughout the league immediately condemned this gesture. Fang argues that this incident is symptomatic of a “long history of exempting ethnic Asian bodies from the proud self-positioning of the United States as the global leader of liberal democracy.”In the following two essays, Rumya S. Putcha and Suk-Young Kim approach the Atlanta attacks from the perspective of two sets of considerations that intersect with issues of anti-Asian violence somewhat more obliquely. First, Putcha, who is a scholar of postcolonial, critical race, and gender studies at the University of Georgia in Athens, the closest major city to Atlanta, considers the cultural context of the Asian spas and massage parlors that were targeted in the Atlanta attacks. She argues that these sorts of establishments are the product of a larger cultural and consumer phenomenon that “tether[s] Orientalism to wellness,” wherein “racialization and racialized expressions of gender are produced by and through performative and discursive practices of wellness.” Meanwhile, Kim, who is a professor of theater and performance studies at UCLA, notes that of the six female Asian victims, four were older ethnically Korean women (the individuals in question ranged from their early fifties to their mid-seventies), and suggests that the significance of the attacks may be productively assessed through the lens of the figure of “the visor-wearing ajumma, a Korean word referencing a middle-aged woman.” Although Kim takes this Korean concept of the ajumma as her starting point, she nevertheless uses it to extrapolate a broader subject position that is shaped not so much by race as it is by gender, class, and age—contending that “transnational and transhistorical ajummahood is also transracial, as the particular working conditions of minority women know no color boundaries.”In the last pair of essays, Emma J. Teng and Grace En-Yi Ting both use intersectional approaches to examine different ways of viewing the subject formations that were invoked in the Atlanta attacks. First, Teng—a historian at MIT whose most recent book examines ideas of racial intermixing in the United States—considers how the volatile mix of racial and sexual concerns raised by the Atlanta attacks resonates with a long-standing set of discourses about miscegenation and racial purity. Finally, Ting, a professor of Japanese literature and gender studies at the University of Hong Kong, offers a more personal reflection on the challenges of addressing issues such as the Atlanta shooting in a Hong Kong context.